With wine a gold status could mean it only works on that one specific setup, not possible on Debian but just arch based systems when you compile that one specific wine version with these 3 patches. But the game would still crash if you alt+tab out one time to often.
On proton I had a surprisingly well experience so far. Most games that didn't just work for me were unity bullshit either way.
a) if something is gold in this context, presumably this means that any fixes that need to be applied will be applied by proton, and the process will be opaque as far as the end-user is concerned
b) needing to apply fixes is not exclusively a "get it to play on linux" thing; I have many store-bought windows games that require fixes (often unofficial) in order to actually get them to play on windows.
According to the article:
> 80% of the top 100 games on Steam now have gold or better ratings [in the Proton DB].
> If you are confused about the various ratings, here’s what it means:
> Native: Game is available on Linux natively
> Platinum: Runs perfectly out of the box
> Gold: Runs perfectly after tweaks
So, not all 80% are either native or supported. Still cool though. I look forward to no longer needing Windows. Options are good.